Noctua Ideas | Micah Neal

Learning to Code

Coding is a skill that I think that everyone should have some knowledge of. The uses for computers are exponentiating and have been for years and a little knowledge of how a computer works will go a long ways to helping you understand the world, as well as what a computer can and cannot do.

I suggest when first learning to program to first learn HTML. HTML is not really programming, instead it’s creating a document that a web-browser can read and display. It is the foundation that all websites are built on.

Next and maybe even concurrent to learning HTML, I think you should learn CSS. It is what make websites look good, without it the presentation of a website is as intresting as a dictionary.

Once you have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS is when you can get your first taste of a real programming language, javaScript! With javaScript you will be able to use conditional logic to alter your webpage.

Now you can learn a server language such as PHP, Python or node.js.

After you’ve learned a couple languages you will notice that there are a lot of similarities like the use of conditional logic and variables is pretty much the same, but the syntax is different. Now you’re starting to think like a programmer! There are lots of similarities between languages but different languages are designed to different things more efficiently.